101–110 of 161 posts
\lambda x. 6 was also surprisingly difficult for him to guess... It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the machine might not care about the input. One Christmas when my whole family got together, I made a "stink detector" which consisted of a USB cable stuck inside a ziplock bag. My nephews were invited to put anybody's sock in the bag, then enter some parameters (like sock color, how long since it was washed, and, c…
"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…
"I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negative, but I find my credulity challenged with this story." My opinion about downvotes is that they reflect way more on reputation of those who actually does the thing (unfortunately they stay anonymous). Well HN rates you using down/up votes but personally since I do not agree with this whole anonymous anti-feature I do not really care. Alternatively (lets ad…
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I remember, when I was a kid, that I had a toy piano where the notes C, D, E, etc. were labeled 1, 2, 3, etc. Later, I tried to get a computer to play a simple melody and assumed that 1=A, 2=B, etc. The result sounded wrong, and eventually by trial and error I figured out that if I put C# in place of C, then everything sounded good. I asked my father why, and he gave me a version of "you'll understand when you're old…
You may have asked him at the worst possible time for him personally. Whyever he didn't explain it at the time, I'm sure it's nothing to do with his love for you.
(And which, incidentally, is surely a reason why many parents are finding working from home during quarantine to be so difficult.)
"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…
I'm not going to downvote you but this is pretty joyless Just because the writing is not up to your standards doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function. Kids love meta stuff (there's a book my niece & nephew were talking about and they were like "it's so weird!!" -- it was meta) Also it's not that hard of a concept. Give kids some credit.
In the last week I have a deal with a friend of mine -- I didn't feel comfortable accepting a gift from him in return for nothing, so I offered to teach him programming. So far, two one-hour sessions later he has a grasp of a lot of the concepts, but the two main things he struggles with are: the environment (i.e. stuff like the command line, etc.), and syntax. I'm teaching him python, in the first one-hour session we learned about variables includings lists and integers, if statements, statements/expressions, and function syntax. We used the second session to refamiliarize some of the syntax for those things, including stuff like telling him about leading whitespace, putting brackets around array indices, and the rest of the time just getting a python file into a folder and getting there in the command line so he could run the file.
He's a very smart person, but his lack of familiarity with the symbol keys on the keyboard, along with the lack of the ability for the command line to cope with spaces in filenames, made it difficult for him.
His main problems aren't knowing how to use the concepts -- he knows what he wants to do -- but the syntax and grammar of the environment constantly get in his way.
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"Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight?" Also possible is that what the kid actually understands and what the parent thinks they are understanding are two different things. The kid is quite likely still wrong in some critical way. But that is where we all start with new things. I've got…
Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies
Could you be swayed to the more optimistic "Education is a series of decreasingly incomplete truths"? I'm a math professor, and we do tend to be able to tell our students the truth, nothing but the truth, but very much not the whole truth, at least in every part of the curriculum that I've seen.
(That we're able to do so doesn't mean no math teachers lie, but it's not as integral—ha!—a part of the curriculum as in physics, say.)
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I'm not going to downvote you but this is pretty joyless Just because the writing is not up to your standards doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function. Kids love meta stuff (there's a book my niece & nephew were talking about and they were like "it's so weird!!" -- it was meta) Also it's not that hard of a concept. Give kids some credit.
> Kids love meta stuff Agreed! > doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function This is where my credulity was stretched. It's interesting and exciting when you first learn about it only if it breaks a rule you've long had in your mind and enables you to do more interesting things. A 6-year-old child hadn't spent years assuming you can't put a function in a function,…
It's still a new way of using a new idea. People (including children) pick up all kinds of assumptions along with the information that they obtain. If you describe something with certain examples, and then do something that isn't seen as possible or covered in those examples, that can be very surprising.
Different children are different people and therefore have different expectations and blindspots.
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I don't think that this problem is even computable, since the functions could be arbitrarily complex. If you restrict the nature of the functions e.g. "polynomials of degree at most d", then the answer depends on the restriction. For the polynomial of degree <= d case the solution is d+1 inputs, every polynomial of degree at most d is uniquely determined by d+1 points.
Sure, but it's bounded by human creativity, and there's anyway a difference between reliably and deterministically computing the function, and a sort of approximation with repeated guesses, or reaching a certain confidence. I only have vague recollections of numerical analysis, I remembered the Newton-Raphson method (no good: we don't have an oracle for f'(x), just f(x)) and stumbled into the Runge-Kutta Wikipedia pa…
You are still implicitly assuming that the function is continuous. There are a lot of nowhere-continuous functions, e.g. the sawtooth function. Or more interestingly, Conway's base13 function, which takes on every real number in every interval.
Also what about continuous non-polynomials? e.g. exponentials, logarithms, sine/cosine etc.?
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I'm not going to downvote you but this is pretty joyless Just because the writing is not up to your standards doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function. Kids love meta stuff (there's a book my niece & nephew were talking about and they were like "it's so weird!!" -- it was meta) Also it's not that hard of a concept. Give kids some credit.
This. Programming isn't difficult, you can teach it to an adult in a one-week course and I've taught the fundamentals (if statements, functions, loops) in a two hour session with multiple adolescent friends, the core concepts are mostly intuitive for anyone with a simple grasp of logic. What is difficult is using those systems to understand larger systems, and all of the other crap that comes in programming. In the l…
Put quotation marks around the file name?
Kids definitely can grasp this on a very tangible level. I just explained function input and output to my 8yr old and she immediately said "Oh so like food is input and poop is output!" Yes we are all functions!